#shadow mane

My 3rd Montage on Gears of War 4 & I wanted too post it on my Tumblr, I Hope You All Enjoy & Thank You So Much!!!

Radiance:Well, we know more about some of their beginnings than others, so keep in mind that not everything I tell you is going to be accurate. Between monologues, witnesses, our own theories, and things they’ve disclosed to me in confidence though, we’re pretty sure we have enough information to give you an origin story for each of them.

Pharaoh Phetlock was a tyrant who was obsessed with immortality.

We believe the body he’s currently possessing belongs to a professor who went missing a few years ago. Between the professor’s published writings and his research topics, we think he got saddled with the Pharoah through either accidental contact with a cursed object, or attempting to recreate dangerous ancient magic he didn’t quite understand.

If he tries hard enough, the professor has surfaced before, but only just long enough to help us thwart the Pharaoh’s plans. It actually makes me very sad, so I’ve been making something I hope we’ll be able to use to help free him one day.

It turns out Saddle Rager and Long Face went to school together. According to Saddle Rager, Long Face has always has issues with depression, but excelled at chemistry, performing arts and applying eyeliner.

Apparently, after they graduated, Longface went into pharmaceuticals.Based on monologue, he was trying to make an antidepressant that works for him, and instead isolated a substance I can only call bottled misery, because I don’t know it’s technical name. He worked with it for months, introducing new compounds to it to see what could make it change. Eventually, being around bottled misery all the time coincided with an incredibly bad day and in a poetic, dramatic, and foolish performative act, he drank it’s super concentrated liquid form.

It amplified everything, he went from exuding sadness to infecting others with it, from dramatic fits of self pity to dramatic fits of terrorism. Unfortunately, after he drank it he also began to secrete it in small amounts through his tear ducts, so he has a constant supply that he doesn’t need equipment to synthesize anymore. Most of the team believes he was permanently altered and now he’s incurable, but I like to hope that some day, someone will figure out how to help him find happiness.

We also have a character witness for High Heel. She has apparently always been a kleptomaniac and hoarded shoes.

She turned to outright criminal behavior over an apparent sibling rift about an ongoing rivalry and what she believes to be their betrayal or neglect, and has been continuing to steal and make scenes out of a combination of greed, spite, compulsion, and to get her sibling‘s attention.

She’s only really interested in shoes and shoe shaped things, and I think that when that when she’s not around shoes or bitter over her sibling, she’s actually not that bad. But her sibling didn’t really do anything wrong, either. We’ve met her sibling, heard both sides of the story, and we think they did the best they could for a long time to deal with her, but now her needs are no longer feasible or reasonable to expect them to take care of on her behalf. They couldn’t continue to be her keeper and keep up with their own life, so they put themselves first for once and High Heel hasn’t adjusted to being responsible for her own life yet.

Shadowmane is from another, much scarier and more violent, universe, and there, she was a hero protecting her kind from massive, vicious beasts that threatened to consume them.

She chased one that slipped through an experimental portal into our world. We managed to send the monster back before the portal broke irreparably, but Shadowmane was stranded.

Unfortunately, she came across as callous and ruthless, so most of the team didn’t trust her, and she blames their dismissal of her for her not making it back to the portal in time, so she hates us. She’s been working as a thief for hire ever since, because her powers lend themselves to stealth and we think she’s looking to amass resources she’ll need to make her own way back home. I hope she gets there.

Smudge was a love spell gone wrong. A lonely mare with no artistic ability found an old spellbook she didn’t know was full of very dangerous ancient magic and tried to sculpt the likeness of her perfect stallion and bring it to life to be her special somepony out of homemade clay she made with flour she brought home from work.

We’ve met this mare. I’ve seen the spell she used. The spell called for a specific clay, from the bed of a specific river, in a specific enchanted stretch of woods, and the text makes many references to how the quality of the clay and the stages of the clay’s transformation was important to both the appearance and personality of her stallion, but she thought was just meant to be symbolic. Because the materials were insufficient and the magic the spell requires is very volatile, prone to corruption, and required that clay to stabilize, the flesh never truly formed, making his body amorphous and tar-like, and his mind never completely formed because, terrified by his flesh, she abandoned him midspell.

We as a team can’t really tell exactly what Smudge’s mental capacity is, or how complex his motivations are. We don’t know if he is intelligent but has a difficult time speaking for physiological reasons, if his capacities are permanently limited to that of a child’s, or if his thoughts are somehow malleable to influences around him and he became evil once imprisoned for the first time because he absorbed their thoughts like a sponge. But I know he can feel. I know he’s in constant distress and I think it’s because he was made to love somepony who abandoned him, and that left him without a purpose, or love, and it broke his heart as it was forming. He’s lashing out, he’s lost and he’s in pain, and I can’t blame him for getting stuck that way.

(Note: All non-villain ponies’ appearances may be altered and all cutiemarks have been censored in the re-enactments to protect the true identities of the depicted.

Shadow: Who gave out my secrets?

Mod: Seems like Shadow is quite sus.

FlashMod: Been working on practicing a lot with head angles and legs. So have a Shadow Mane attempting to steal something.

Shadow’s Thoughts: Seems like I can trust you enough. 

This is the only form I can shift into. My ancestors in the past could shift into many more things but, because of the “Curse of the Fox” laid on my family line, we’ve all been stuck to just this form other than our Pony form we were born to.